“By far the darkest feature in their social condition was seen in the family relation.  Society, however, is only a word of mere accommodation, designed to express domestic relations as they then existed.  ‘Society’ was, indeed, such a sea of pollution as cannot be well described.  Marriage was unknown, and all the sacred feelings which are suggested to our minds on mention of the various social relations, such as husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister, were to them, indeed, as though they had no existence.  There was, indeed, in this respect, a dreary blank—­a dark chasm from which the soul instinctively recoils.  There were, perhaps, some customs which imposed some little restraint upon the intercourse of the sexes, but those customs were easily dispensed with, and had nothing of the force of established rules.  It was common for a husband to have many wives, and for a wife also to have many husbands.  The nearest ties of consanguinity were but little regarded, and among the chiefs, especially, the connection of brother with sister, and parent with child, were very common.  For husbands to interchange wives, and for wives to interchange husbands, was a common act of friendship, and persons who would not do this were not considered on good terms of sociability.  For a man or woman to refuse a solicitation was considered an act of meanness; and this sentiment was thoroughly wrought into their minds, that, they seemed not to rid themselves of the feeling of meanness in a refusal, to feel, notwithstanding their better knowledge, that to comply was generous, liberal, and social, and to refuse reproachful and niggardly.  It would be impossible to enumerate or specify the crimes which emanated from this state of affairs.  Their political condition was the very genius of despotism, systematically and deliberately conducted.  Kings and chiefs were extremely jealous of their succession, and the more noble their blood, the more they were venerated by the common people.”

Mr. Sheldon Dibble is a historian whose work was published in 1843.  He complains most bitterly that the natives bothered the missionaries by trying to give them the benefit of native thought.  They wanted to do some of the talking, and said very childish things, and were so intent on their own thoughts that they would not listen to the preachers.  But it ought not to have been held to be an offense for a procession of heathen to march to a missionary’s house and tell him their thoughts.  That was an honest manifestation of profound interest—­the slow ripening of a harvest field.  Mr. Dibble’s book is printed by the Mission Seminary, and Mr. Dibble says, page 21:  “We know that all the inhabitants of the earth descended from Noah,” therefore, the Hawaiians “must once have known the great Jehova and the principles of true religion.”  But the historian says on the next page that the Hawaiians were heathen from time immemorial, for, “Go back to the very first reputed progenitor of the Hawaiian race, and you find that the ingredients of their character are lust, anger, strife, malice, sensuality, revenge and the worship of idols.”  This is the elevation upon which Mr. Dibble places himself to fire upon the memory of the English navigator Captain James Cook.  The first paragraph of the assault on Cook is this: